Richard Serra

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Richard Serra
Born November 2, 1938 (age 78)
San Francisco, California, U.S.
Nationality American
Education University of California, Berkeley (attended)
University of California, Santa Barbara (B.A. 1961)
Yale University (B.F.A. 1962, M.F.A. 1964)
Style Minimalism
Movement Process Art
Spouse(s) Nancy Graves (m. 1965; div. 1970)
Clara Weyergraf (m. 1981)

Bramme for the Ruhr-District, 1998 at Essen

Sea Level (South-West part), Zeewolde, Netherlands

Richard Serra (born November 2, 1938) is an American minimalist sculptor and video
artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal.[1] Serra was
involved in the Process Art Movement. He lives and works in Tribeca, New York, and
on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.

Contents [hide]
1 Early life and education
2 Work
2.1 Early sculptures
2.2 Large steel sculptures
2.3 Memorials
2.4 Performance and video art
2.5 Prints and drawings
3 Exhibitions
4 Collections
5 Recognition
6 Controversies
7 Art market
8 Personal life
9 See also
10 References
Early life and education[edit]
Serra was born on November 2, 1938, in San Francisco as the second of three sons.
[2][3] His father, Tony, was a Spanish native of Mallorca who worked as a candy
factory foreman.[4] His mother, Gladys Feinberg, was a Los Angeles-born Russian
Jewish immigrant from Odessa (she committed suicide in 1979).[5][6][7][8] He went
on to study English literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1957
before transferring to the University of California, Santa Barbara, graduating with
a B.A. in 1961.[9][10] While at Santa Barbara, he studied art with Howard Warshaw
and Rico Lebrun. On the West Coast, he helped support himself by working in steel
mills, which was to have a strong influence on his later work. Serra discussed his
early life and influences in an interview in 1993. He described the San Francisco
shipyard where his father worked as a pipe-fitter as another important influence to
his work, saying of his early memory All the raw material that I needed is
contained in the reserve of this memory which has become a reoccurring dream.[11]

Serra studied painting in the M.F.A. program at the Yale University School of Art
and Architecture between 1961 and 1964. Fellow Yale Art and Architecture alumni of
the 1960s include the painters, photographers, and sculptors Brice Marden, Chuck
Close, Nancy Graves, Gary Hudson and Robert Mangold. He claims to have taken most
of his inspiration from the artists who taught there, most notably Philip Guston
and the experimental composer Morton Feldman, as well as designer Josef Albers.[3]
With Albers, he worked on his book Interaction of Color (1963).[12] He continued
his training abroad, spending a year each in Florence and Paris. In 1964, he was
awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for Rome, where he lived and worked with his first
wife, sculptor Nancy Graves. Since then, he has lived in New York, where he first
used rubber in 1966 and began applying his characteristic work material lead in
1968.[13] In New York, his circle of friends included Carl Andre, Walter De Maria,
Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson.[14] At one point, to fund his art,
Serra started a furniture-removals business, Low-Rate Movers,[3] and employed Chuck
Close, Philip Glass, Spalding Gray, and others.[15]

Work[edit]
Early sculptures[edit]
In 1966, Serra made his first sculptures out of nontraditional materials such as
fiberglass and rubber.[14] Serra's earliest work was abstract and process-based
made from molten lead hurled in large splashes against the wall of a studio or
exhibition space. In 1967 and 1968 he compiled a list of infinitives that served as
catalysts for subsequent work to hurl suggested the hurling of molten lead into
crevices between wall and floor; to roll led to the rolling of the material into
dense, metal logs.[16] He began in 1969 to be primarily concerned with the cutting,
propping or stacking of lead sheets, rough timber, etc., to create structures, some
very large, supported only by their own weight.[17] His Prop pieces from the late
1960s are arranged so that weight and gravity balance lead rolls and sheets.
Cutting Device Base Plate Measure (1969) consists of an assemblage of heterogeneous
materials (lead, wood, stone and steel) into which two parallel cuts have been made
and the results strewn around in a chance configuration.[18] In Malmo Role (1984),
a four-foot-square steel plate, one and a half inches thick, bisects a corner of
the room and is prevented from falling by a short cylindrical prop wedged into the
corner of the walls.[19]

Still, he is better known for his minimalist constructions from large rolls and
sheets of metal (COR-TEN steel). Many of these pieces are self-supporting and
emphasize the weight and nature of the materials. Rolls of lead are designed to sag
over time.[citation needed]

Large steel sculptures[edit]

Hours of the Day (1990), Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht.

Around 1970, Serra shifted his activities outdoors and became a pioneer of large-
scale site-specific sculpture.[5] Serra often constructs site-specific
installations, frequently on a scale that dwarfs the observer. His site-specific
works challenge viewers perception of their bodies in relation to interior spaces
and landscapes, and his work often encourages movement in and around his
sculptures.[11][20] Most famous is the Torqued Ellipse series, which began in 1996
as single elliptical forms inspired by the soaring space of the early 17th century
Baroque church San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome.[21] Made of huge steel
plates bent into circular sculptures with open tops, they rotate upward as they
lean in or out.[22]

Serra usually begins a sculpture by making a small maquette (or model) from flat
plates at an inch-to-foot ratio a 40-foot piece will start as a 40-inch model.[23]
He often makes these models in lead as it is very malleable and easy to rework
continuously; Torqued Ellipses, however, began as wooden models.[23] He then
consults a structural engineer, who specifies how the piece should be made to
retain its balance and stability.[5] The steel pieces are fabricated in Germany and
installed by Long Island rigging company Budco Enterprises, with whom he has worked
for most of his career.[22] The weathering steel he uses takes about 8-10 years to
develop its characteristic dark, even patina of rust. Once the surface is fully
oxidized, the color will remain relatively stable over the piece's life.[5]
Serra's first larger commissions were mostly realized outside the United States.
Shift (197072) consists of six walls of concrete zigzag across a grassy hillside
in King City, Ontario. Spin Out (197273), a trio of steel plates facing one
another, is situated on the grounds of the Krller-Mller Museum in Otterlo, the
Netherlands.[5] (Schunnemunk Fork (1991), a work similar to that of his in the
Netherlands can be found in Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York.)[24] Part of
a series works involving round steelplates, Elevation Circles In and Out (197277)
was installed at Schlosspark Haus Weitmar in Bochum, Germany.[25]

For documenta VI (1977), Serra designed Terminal, four 41-foot-tall trapezoids that
form a tower, situated in front of the main exhibition venue. After long
negotiations, accompanied by violent protests, Terminal was purchased by the city
of Bochum and finally installed at the city's train station in 1979.[26] Carnegie
(198485), a 39-foot-high vertical shaft outside the Carnegie Museum of Art in
Pittsburgh, received high praise.[5] Similar sculptures, like Fulcrum (1987), Axis
(1989), and Torque (1992), were later installed in London's Broadgate, at
Kunsthalle Bielefeld, and at Saarland University, respectively. Initially located
in the French town of Puteaux, Slat (1985) consists of five steel plates - four
trapezoidal and one rectangular - each one roughly 12 feet wide and 40 feet tall,
[27] that lean on one another to form a tall, angular tepee. Already in 1989
vandalism and graffiti prompted that towns mayor to remove it, and only in
December 2008, after almost 20 years in storage, Slat was re-anchored in La
Dfense. Because of its weight, officials chose to ground it in a traffic island
behind the Grande Arche.[28]

Richard Serra's Tilted Spheres in Terminal 1 Pier F at Toronto's YYZ airport

In 1981, Serra installed Tilted Arc, a gently curved, 3.5 meter high arc of rusting
mild steel in the Federal Plaza in New York City. There was controversy over the
installation from day one, largely from workers in the buildings surrounding the
plaza who complained that the steel wall obstructed passage through the plaza. A
public hearing in 1985 voted that the work should be moved, but Serra argued the
sculpture was site specific and could not be placed anywhere else. Serra famously
issued an often-quoted statement regarding the nature of site-specific art when he
said, To remove the work is to destroy it. Eventually on March 15, 1989, the
sculpture was dismantled by federal workers and taken for scrap. In May 1989 the
work was cut into three parts and consigned to a New Yo